According to The Siberian Times a very bright flash turned night into day over vast swathes of Russia on January 7, 2018 around 00:22 local time. The phenomenon, which was seen over thousands of kilometers, was accompanied by a ground-shaking explosion and occurred near the Ural Mountains and the three republics of Bashkortostan, Udmurtia, and Tatarstan.

Ilnaz Shaykhraziev said:

'I saw the flash, while in Menzelinsk. There was also the sound of an explosion and then a vibration, I felt it.'

Another witness, Denis Rozenfeld, said:

'A meteor burned out, not reaching the lower layers of the atmosphere. Before this it exploded and split into many small pieces. That is why there was such a sound, which came to us in a few seconds. It's a funny coincidence that such a rare phenomenon for our region has happened right on Christmas.'

An astronomer from Kazan Federal University agreed with this assessment. Dr Sergey Golovkin, of the university's Physics Institute said:

'This was a bolide that burnt in the dense layers of the atmosphere which is why it was seen over such a big territory. We didn't register the flash because there was strong blizzard on this night.'

Four months after a spectacular fireball was seen over Northeast Pennsylvania and witnessed by people attending a home football game at Wallenpaupack Area High School, another was seen on December 29th, over Lake Wallenpaupack.

Fireballs are extraordinarily bright examples of meteors, still commonly referred to as "shooting stars." Actually small bits of rock and often left over debris from a comet, meteors become visible when they are captured by Earth's gravity, and they vaporize high in the atmosphere.

Typically seen 40 to 60 miles above the ground, this fireball was by no means limited in view from the northern Poconos.

"We're starting to get the sense that there was a bright fireball, which is basically the bigger cousin of a shooting star," said Scott Young, manager of the Manitoba Museum's planetarium and science gallery.

We're getting several reports of people seeing a bright flash in the sky, and it sparked our interest here at Valley News Live as well.

Our Chief Meteorologist Hutch Johnson says that this is the peak time of the year for the Quadrantid meteor shower, and he believes that could be behind the mysterious flash.

We've gotten reports from north of the Fargo area all the way up to northern Minnesota in the Lake of the Woods area.

Comment: Update: The TwinCities Pioneer Pressreports that an officer with the Bemidji, Minnesota Police Department caught a meteor with his dash cam the same day:

In a video posted Thursday afternoon to the Bemidji Police Department's Facebook page, a meteor can be seen on the officer's dash-cam video plummeting towards the Earth's surface before quickly fizzling out. The video was taken Wednesday night.

A kilometer-size asteroid slammed into Earth about 800,000 years ago with so much force that it scattered debris across a 10th of our planet's surface. Yet its impact crater remains undiscovered. Now, glassy remains believed to have come from the strike suggest the asteroid hit southeast Asia as our close ancestors walked the Earth.

"This impact event is the youngest of this size during human evolution with likely worldwide effects," says Mario Trieloff, a geochemist at the University of Heidelberg in Germany not involved in the research. Large impacts can disrupt Earth's climate by spewing dirt and soot high into the atmosphere, where it can block sunlight for months or even years.

Putative remains from this impact have been found before. Researchers have recovered chunks of glassy debris known as tektites across Asia, Australia, and Antarctica, and their distribution pattern suggests the asteroid struck Southeast Asia: The largest tektites-weighing more than 20 kilograms and presumably ejected the shortest distances from the impact-have been found there.

To laypeople, the "muck" found in certain areas of Alaska and Yukon is just dirt - dark, silty, often frozen, and full of plant material. To miners, it is somewhat of a nuisance. When dug out and left to thaw, the muck lets loose a fetid stench due to its high organic content. To scientists, however, the muck is a graveyard, and a fascinating one at that. Over the years, thousands of remains of bison, mammoth, horse, musk ox, moose, lynx, lion, mastodon, bear, caribou, and even camel have been uncovered.

More interesting than the mere presence of this zoological gold mine is the actual condition of the remains. Cached inside the frozen mucks for as long as 48,000 years, the remains are remarkably well preserved, with some carcasses mostly intact and effectively mummified. Even more curious, many animals show no signs of predation, scavenging, or decomposition, and despite disarticulated bones, seemed to be in relatively good health at the time of their demise.

They think the seemingly sudden deaths of many of these animals in the Alaskan and Yukon mucks could be explained by airbursts and impacts from comet debris that struck Earth during the Late Pleistocene, between 11,000 and 46,000 years ago. Hagstrum and his colleagues recently presented new evidence for this idea in the journal Scientific Reports.

"In keeping silent about evil, in burying it so deep within us that no sign of it appears on the surface, we are implanting it, and it will rise up a thousand fold in the future. When we neither punish nor reproach evildoers, we are not simply protecting their trivial old age, we are thereby ripping the foundations of justice from beneath new generations."

- Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn

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